CMS Made Simple Forums

Congrats on the release of 1.0 beta - for a bit back there I never thought it would happen.

I've just had one of those mornings which reaffirms my decision to recommend CMSMS to clients.

I built one of my client's sites in the dim distant past before CMSMS was really what it is now. Back then I liked the look of CMSMS but wasn't sure if it'd stay alive or be abandoned or fork to death so I went for ... Mambo. Oh how I kick myself now.

Unfortunately the site required some customising of the Mambo source code which happens to prevent me from editing stuff like... the contents of the head tag... or whether everything is neatly nested in a million table tags distributed throughout the code (because obviously separating content, layout and function from each other is for wimps, real CMSes have all the code intertwined in one big knot). So it couldn't be updated and is now using a little used, and less supported fork of Mambo from before Mambo all disappeared and turned into Joomla and we don't mention Mambo any more... Great 

The upshot is I am supposed to be doing some SEO and can't get the page title to print into the title tag because the object containing the page title hasn't loaded yet when the template starts printing.

It's absolutely horrific.

Children, if the nasty man asks why you don't use Mambo or Joomla, please, tell them from me, they suck so horribly it's untrue.

When I started my job here at DARcorporation our websites were all running on Mambo.  Everyone hated it except for the guy I replaced, but I had to fight tooth and nail to replace it with something else.  I spent probably 40 hours testing a variety of other content managers just so I could make a case for something other than that wretched mess of a content manager.  It felt a bit chancey going with CMSMS, seeing as how it was on .11 or so when we started using it, but I haven't regretted it an iota.

jubydoo & uptoeleven,

it is so good to hear your points of view on this.

Quite recently I was sooooo excited when I tried out Mambo and Joomla, and started building a site in each of them.

Well, days later when I went back to edit them both, I had to re-learn all over again how to use the cms ... absolutely not intuitive!  one site I overwrote with a different web builder almost immediately and the second one badly needs updating and i realise I'm procrastinating because it's in joomla.

after I install CMSMS I might just overwrite that one too )

The thing with CMSMS that won me over is it's the spitting image of the first CMS I ever used in terms of its structure. My old job with www.goodtechnology.com (I left 3 years ago) mostly involved working on Audi's website. We used java/jsp and oracle and all the cms out there were a bit pants so we rolled our own. It worked very similarly to CMSMS although obviously this was back in 2001 and things were different back then.

I spent months looking for a suitable CMS and settled on Mambo despite reservations which have been fully realised - it is a crock. CMSMS is properly object oriented, it has proper separation of content, layout and style, it's a nice bit of kit. But the thing that's always won me over is that the guys who really work on it - people like Ted, Calguy, sjg and the rest - all hang out in IRC so you can get hold of them and they're nice chaps.

Works properly, put together properly, maintained properly, nice one